by J. F. Halpin
The blast took most of the group out of commission. He was readying another when he felt something kick him from behind. Bard fell into his back just as he fired his weapon. Summers turned, expecting another intruder, only to see the man firing directly into the back wall.
“What—?” Summers stopped as he noticed that the wall was gone. In its place was an extremely surprised thin man, still standing at the bottom of the hill, the floor of their bunker gradually giving way to grass. Impossibly, behind the man, Summers could still see the bunker they were in.
It was at that point he remembered he was holding a live grenade.
“Oh, fuck!” Summers hurled the grenade at the thin man. He stumbled at the impact, and the portal collapsed. The wall of the bunker reappeared once more. Chunks of square, cut concrete clattered to the ground in its wake.
Summers stared wide-eyed at the sight. If the thin man had tried the same trick he’d done before, Summers might have blown them all to hell.
“Uh, good job.” He clapped Bard on the back.
Just as Summers finished, a distant roar sounded. Then, suddenly, it was closer. Much closer. He turned to see the face of the dragon nearly a hundred feet from the bunker, charging at them through a portal being held open by a very pissed-off looking thin man.
“Oh . . .”
Summers grabbed Bard and pushed him toward the center of the bunker.
“We need to get out of here, now!” Summers raised his rifle, firing at yet another man in the doorway. The creature’s footsteps were shaking the ground with every step. Summers was not optimistic about the bunker’s chances of stopping something like that.
“I don’t think that’s happening!” Nowak answered, as gunfire peppered the entrance.
Summers scrabbled for an idea before he remembered the room below them.
“Down. Through the hatch—go!” Summers fired a continuous burst toward the groups of enemies still climbing the hill, hoping to give the others enough time to retreat.
It took only a moment’s hesitation before they began to move. Summers could see the dragon still charging, seconds away.
“Summers!” Nowak shouted.
Summers saw that the others had made it to the hatch, and he turned on his heel to follow, just as something caught his leg. He heard something tear.
Summers turned to see the bag that had been at his side lying partially open, the activation wire tangled around his boot. The metallic tinkling of the levers hitting concrete let him know that a few of those grenades had come loose, and they were now live.
Summers really, truly hated that bag with every fiber of his being.
“Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” Summers grabbed the bag and heaved it out the window with everything he had, straight into the path of the dragon. He felt the rest of the tape tear loose as the grenades spilled out, not nearly far enough away for his tastes.
Summers moved as fast as he could. He saw the surprised looks on his friends’ faces as he slammed the hatch shut on them, just before an explosion of light, sound, and concrete overtook him.
<<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>>
Summers awoke to find himself sprawled on the ground, looking at the half-collapsed ceiling of their former bunker.
He saw the head of the monstrous dragon lying in front of him. He tried to get to his feet before the pain stopped him.
Then he realized it wasn’t moving.
Summers stopped struggling as he noticed the substantial crater in the creature’s neck, large enough for Summers to see its spine. Its head was leaking some kind of liquid that was probably important.
He’d never gotten a good look at the creature when he’d first seen it, but up close, it looked to be falling apart. Even discounting the damage he’d done to it. Pieces of flesh sluffed off the bones of its torn wings, and the skin looked rotted, like it had been dead for weeks.
Summers didn’t linger on that long, though. The important part was that it wasn’t moving. Which was good, because Summers was fairly sure he’d broken something.
He tried again to get to his feet, only to feel a strange resistance from his back. He looked down to see a large piece of rebar sticking out from his chest.
Shit.
His first instinct was to ask for help. But as he looked over to the hatch, he found that it had been buried beneath a small pile of rubble.
“Of fucking course.”
After a moment of psyching himself up, Summers pulled the piece of metal from his chest with one fluid motion, gritting his teeth with the effort. Blood flowed freely from the wound—something he was sure he’d have to handle quickly. For now, he limped over to the hatch, a dull thumping growing louder as he approached. He understood immediately that the others were trying to get out.
Then the hatch disappeared, and Summers found the bloody, partially burned form of the thin man in front of him. He only had a moment to react before the man’s hand snaked out toward his neck, grabbing him before he could stumble away.
“That’s enough for now.” The thin man looked at Summers, a soft smile on his face. “I have to say, you are by far one of the most interesting individuals I’ve come across here. How did you get outside our control range?”
Summers struggled to break the man’s grip, only to realize he was as strong as Summers. Given the monster they’d just killed, that shouldn’t have been a surprise.
“Fuck . . . you . . .”
“Original.” The thin man effortlessly threw Summers into the dragon’s corpse. He felt something snap on impact, but from the pain in his side, he wasn’t sure if it was the dragon, or him.
Summers looked up in time to see the thin man walking forward, more of the beast-like men and women pouring in from the outside. More than a few had rifles trained on him as they entered.
This was not looking good.
Summers watched as the thin man appraised him. He was covered in the black, shifting, tar-like substance Summers recognized from the hamr he’d fought in the city. Though oddly, it wasn’t covering him completely; there were still patches of skin around his neck, arms and sides. Summers could see his very human ears, as well as a few tattoos that looked more appropriate on a grunt than on whatever he now was.
“What the hell are you?”
“We are a harbinger,” the thin man explained. “Now then . . .”
The thin man raised a hand toward Summers, then paused.
“Something’s wrong. . . . Your mind should be . . .”
Summers grunted in pain. He could feel parts of his body shifting at the man’s gesture, more like a muscle spasm than anything. But by the confusion on the thin man’s face, that wasn’t what he was trying to do.
“What’s the matter with you?” The man leaned forward, looking at Summers intensely before putting a hand on his forehead. “What have you done to your head?”
“This.” Summers reached back and gripped the exposed spine of the dragon. In retrospect, announcing that he was about to make a move may have been a mistake. Just as the dragon’s tail swept through the cracked concrete, two bullets slammed into its body, inches from Summers’ position. He allowed the momentum to carry him around as he forced the creature to use its entire body as a blunt instrument, sending everyone in the room but himself into the wall opposite.
There was a series of crunching noises as the dragon came to a stop. Summers concentrated, forcing the creature to back off.
The room had been painted various shades of red in its wake. A group of men had somehow survived the worst of what happened, their mangled arms and legs struggling to move to the weapons that had been thrown to the far corner. Summers allowed the creature to tilt to its side and crushed them.
He took a breath as he slumped out of the creature, utterly spent. Summers wasn’t sure how the skeen’s power worked, but after moving something that big, he felt as if he’d run a marathon. Considering they more or less had done that before they came here. . . Summers didn’t have much left
in him.
“That . . . was interesting.”
Summers groaned as he looked up to find the thin man still very much alive, though his torso looked to be bent at a ninety-degree angle. He sat, twisted in the most grotesque manner Summers could imagine.
“Just . . . fuck you.”
That was all Summers could manage. His breath was coming in ragged gasps now, his head swimming as he forced himself to stay awake.
Thankfully, the thin man didn’t get up. He just sat there, watching as Summers struggled to his feet, then threw open the freshly cleared hatch that led below.
His friends were waiting for him.
“What the fuck happened?” Nowak looked up at Summers. All of them had their weapons trained on him.
Summers didn’t answer. Instead, he awkwardly sat, then lay on his back. Vaguely, he could hear Synel yelling to Nowak about the gouge in his side. That wasn’t important right now, though. He was sure things would work out. He let his attention drift, looking up at the sky above.
It had been a really shitty day.
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“Oscar Zulu Three, do you read me?” Nowak spoke into the handheld radio.
There was no answer.
The radio had more than a few dents in it; the fighting had seen to the end of most of their horses, and the equipment they carried.
Asle watched as Synel treated Summers’ wounds. She’d removed his shirt, working to clean the large gash in his torso, among dozens of other things. Cortez had said he was more shrapnel than man at this point. Asle wasn’t sure what that meant, but she was certain it was bad.
He’d been too weak to do anything else for more than an hour now, even though his wounds had mostly sealed up.
That wasn’t what worried her, though. The strange, thin man sat at the far end of what remained of the bunker. Cortez had held a gun to him the entire time Pat and the twins had secured him within the bunker’s basement using a few lengths of rope. Asle had been the one to suggest they not touch him. His skin looked eerily similar to the hamr’s, and she’d already experienced firsthand what that thing did to a person.
Cortez had instead decided to drop a big rock on his legs and arms and hope for the best.
Asle was not fond of the snapping noises she heard.
Despite all that, though, the thin man just laid there, smiling at them. He didn’t answer any of their questions, just stared back with that same eerie expression.
It worried her.
Cortez scowled down at him. The man’s smile didn’t waver.
“Army should be here soon.” Nowak tossed the radio to the side, frustrated. “Just need to keep him like this until then.”
Asle watched as the thin man seemed to consider that a moment.
“What if we made a deal?” He managed to smile, despite his appearance.
“You got a shitty sense of humor,” Cortez replied. “Not a chance in hell we’re making a deal with . . . whatever the hell you are.”
“We’ve already—” The thin man stopped. “Ah, our mistake. It has been a while since we’ve spoken to someone . . . new. We are a harbinger. We came to your world in search of people. People like you.” He eyed Cortez.
“Since you’re feeling chatty, mind telling us where the rest of your group is? That would buy a lot of good will, since you’re so eager to make a deal before the army gets here and all.” Cortez smiled back.
“Apologies, we’ve explained ourselves poorly. We’re aware that you and yours are not native to this place. When we said ‘your world,’ we meant yours. In every sense of the word. We hadn’t even touched this place until you showed it to us. And we have to say, those are odds we still haven’t wrapped our heads around. Life in this galaxy is rare. Far, far more than you can imagine.”
Everyone froze as the thin man’s smile only widened.
“Good, let us get to the point. We want your bodies. That is, unfortunately, a point we cannot budge on. The system has forced priorities onto us and that is at the top. We can, however, promise you that you will be back.”
“What do you mean? What’s happening on our world?”
“Submit to us, and we’ll ensure you survive to learn about it. You’ll be revived, just as the others of our kin.” The thin man gestured to a few of the soldiers. “More than a few of yours understood the rationale. We gave them the same deal: a place for them, and their families.”
“That’s a lie,” Cortez snapped.
“Why would I lie? My standing—well, lying here should be proof we can do as we say. The rest is just a matter of . . .” The thin man hesitated a moment. “Paperwork? Details, at any rate.”
The group was left in stunned silence at the offer.
Before anyone could answer, Pat called out. They each turned to see a dust trail rising in the distance, the unmistakable sign of something traveling the road.
“—unker Three, we are fifteen minutes from your location.” The radio sounded from behind Nowak.
“Thank god for small miracles,” Nowak said in a low voice.
Asle watched the approaching cloud with trepidation.
She had never really liked the army, or trusted them, even despite her friends’ insistence that they were “better than most assholes.”
But now, seeing the smiles on the others’ faces, she couldn’t help but hope that she was wrong.
Chapter 41: Useful
“Ow . . .” Summers grit his teeth as Synel pulled another shard of metal from his back.
“Least you look a little less . . . dead.” Cortez was smiling down at him, but it was clear that she was worried.
Orvar and Pat were beside her; both stood tense. That probably wasn’t a good sign, everything considered. Summers’ brain wasn’t quite back to one hundred percent—not until he got about a weeks’ worth of sleep—but from the amount of blood that was slowly pooling around him, he was definitely not doing well.
“How’s it going back there . . . ?” Summers started to turn, then stopped as a jolt of pain ran through him.
Synel had insisted on taking a look at him after the incident, and he was fortunately too out of it to protest. As it turned out, he had enough shrapnel inside him to ensure he’d be pissing rust the rest of his life.
Only his back and left arm were really affected, though most of it was skin deep in the most literal sense. There was a good chance the stone-like skin on his torso, and his new, freakishly fast healing had kept him in one piece after the explosion.
“Almost done,” Synel assured. Her voice sounded shakier than he was used to.
They’d all been awake for some time now. Summers, being a soldier, had gotten used to falling asleep at a moment’s notice. So, while a few of them had managed to get at least a few hours of rest in between their frantic escapes, the others were not so lucky, and the fatigue was showing.
On top of that, Summers knew he needed real, actual medical attention. Thankfully, according to Nowak, the army was close.
“Here they come,” Nowak announced as a small column of Humvees rolled to a stop at the bottom of the hill. “Best behavior, people.”
Summers watched as soldiers in full gear stepped out, almost all of them wearing some kind of hazmat equipment—gas masks and plastic coverings. Most gawked at the bodies of the men who’d died in the battle, giving them a wide berth.
A woman moved to the front of the pack, snapping off orders as she came forward. She was short, angry, and far older than Summers would have expected. Definitely an officer. Nowak had mentioned the woman he spoke with on the radio was an O-5, though Summers wasn’t clear on how that rank translated in a place like this.
“Lieutenant Colonel Rivers?” Nowak gave the woman a tired salute.
“Sergeant.” The colonel smiled. “I’m happy to see you made it.”
“Not as happy as we are, ma’am. We need medical assistance. One of our own’s torn up pretty bad.”
“Jacobs!” Rivers signaled a
man. He rushed forward toward their group for about a dozen feet, and then stopped.
Actually, the entire group was now staring directly at Summers.
“The fuck are you waiting for?” Cortez asked. “He needs help.”
“Stay where you are!” Rivers yelled, the slightest hint of panic in her voice. “Step away from that man, now.”
Summers looked down at his bloodied, gray chest. Of course. It was natural she’d think he was like the others infected by the hamr.
Nowak raised his hands, looking between the colonel and Summers. “Colonel Rivers, ma’am, I know what you’re thinking, but if you’ll hear us out—”
“I will hear an explanation when you have stepped away from him! Now move!”
Summers nodded to the now nervous Synel, trying to struggle to his feet. From what he’d seen, anyone who had been under the hamr’s control didn’t talk much. So, that left at least one easy way to set her at ease.
“Colonel . . .” Summers steadied himself. “I think you’ll want to hear what we have to say.”
He gestured to the bunker behind them.
“And let me tell you, if you think I’m a problem, you’ll want to see what we have in the hole back there.”
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Asle watched as Summers tried to reassure the medics that were tending to him outside the bunker. She didn’t like that. He was hurt, and they were supposed to be his allies. They should be helping him. She understood that they were afraid, that was normal, but it didn’t change how she felt.
Most of the other soldiers stood beside the cadre of Jeeps. They wore strange clothing that covered them from head to toe. Some were going over Pat and the twins, asking them a slew of questions.
Curiously, they all looked exhausted. Some were injured, their arms in slings; one man was missing a hand entirely.
Asle knew warriors. She knew the dangers they were expected to face. These people had come here expecting a fight, and they’d brought their injured. To Asle, that could only mean one thing.
They were desperate. And that didn’t bode well at all.
“Wiped out . . . ?”
